


What's in a name?

by that_melancholy_dream



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-23 20:51:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8342272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/that_melancholy_dream/pseuds/that_melancholy_dream
Summary: A moment in the life of two friends, one rather peculiar, the other less so. Possibly in the afternoon of my "Breakfast at Baker Street." Or some other day entirely. A lazy sort of day, anyway.





	

Sherlock stomped into the sitting room, tossed his mobile onto the coffee table and then tossed himself face first onto the sofa in a flurry of blue silk dressing gown. “Mycroft is threatening me with a knighthood,” he muttered angrily into the Union Jack cushion.

“Hmm?” John was sitting at the desk, scowling at his laptop, not really paying attention to his flatmate. Other than to quickly check that Sherlock hadn’t nicked his pistol again – firearms and a Sherlock in a sulk was a dangerous combination, a fact Mrs Hudson’s wall bore witness to.

Sherlock lifted his head a fraction. “He wants me to take a case. If I don’t, he will have me knighted, the insufferable idiot.” And he let his head flop down again, heaving a huge dramatic sigh while he was at it.

“That’s, um… an unconventional threat.”

There was a pause. Sherlock kept breathing into the cushion and presumably inhaling a fair amount of fluff. John kept trying to untangle his notes on their latest case and put the weird series of events into some semblance of order for his blog. But the more he simplified the story, the more idiotic it got – and the more details he included, the more incomprehensible it got. And neither alternative did justice to Sherlock’s deductive genius. John knew that what he should do, really, was ask Sherlock to describe the convoluted deductions again but he wasn’t looking forward to Sherlock’s whining and huffing about John’s powers of observation, or lack thereof – Sherlock in a sulk was even less forgiving than usual of his fellowman’s intellectual shortcomings… so instead, John found himself asking, “How does one go about refusing a knighthood?”

Sherlock rolled over to his side so that his face was, um, facing John’s… face – see, how was he supposed to write about Sherlock’s bloody elaborate deductions if he couldn’t even think straight? “Just look her in the eye,” Sherlock said slowly, fixing John with a sharp, piercing glare, “and say no.”

John’s mind wasn’t one hundred per cent on Sherlock yet, his fingers still resting on the keyboard. “Just say no?”

“Well,” Sherlock shrugged and rolled one quarter of a turn more, ending up on his back, “I suppose _you_ would be more likely to say ‘I respectfully decline the honour, Your Majesty’ or some such drivel.” He flung his arms about in what John assumed was a parody of a courtly bow. Or else Sherlock was having a fit. Or possibly being attacked by a swarm of invisible bees…

“Hmm. Probably,” John agreed.

Not that he’d applied any such swishing hand gestures when he’d met the Queen – just a few weeks earlier, during a case, of course – but he had had to fight an impulse to bow excessively. He was still quietly and calmly reeling from the shock, it was one thing to fight for Queen and Country, quite another to sit down and have a chat with her in person. Naturally, Sherlock had been perfectly at ease. Also, naturally, Sherlock refused to give any details on the baffling matter of his state of undress but John couldn’t quite shake the impression that this time the detective had been dressed in a sheet by royal request. It was completely ridiculous but, well, there it was.

“But can you imagine the complications?” Sherlock was moaning, the hands flung to cover his face. “Would you turn to a _Sir_ Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective, with your private problems? God, the clients would feel compelled to call me Sir Sherlock. Ugh.”

John giggled. “Right, you swanning around in your pyjama bottoms and dressing gown.”

He ought to take a picture of Sherlock – sprawled on the sofa like a man-sized ragdoll, the dressing gown and one leg spilling over the edge, the other leg up so that the bare foot was resting on top of the backrest, face obscured by the large hands, dark curls escaping in all directions, the elegant figure so gracefully displayed on the beaten brown leather upholstery – post it and see what sort of clients they’d get. Would the Queen insist on an audience with Sherlock (semi-)dressed like that?

John cast a despairing look around and muttered, “And the state of our flat – very knighty.”

“Knighty?” the detective exclaimed and then emitted a growl, rubbing at his face furiously. “Honestly, John, the way you mutilate the English language, I should bring charges against you.”

“Knight… Is it knightly? Why does it feel like it should be _Mister_ Knightly?”

There was a deep, resounding, rumbling sigh of ‘who the hell cares’ from the sofa.

John debated whether to enter ‘mr knightly’ into a search engine, it felt like he should know who it was and it was part of his job description – a very small part, admittedly – to provide the kind of everyday, pop-culture-reference, solar-system-related bits of information that Sherlock simply deleted from his mental hard drive. It could be a vital piece of information for solving a murder, one day, perhaps… or not. He couldn’t be arsed to check.

“Then again, why not?” John asked distractedly while glaring at a piece of particularly complicated deducing, made utterly indecipherable by the messy sentence structure he’d wrapped it in. Damn, he didn’t need a spellchecker, he needed a Sherlock-checker for his laptop… “Sir Sherlock has a nice ring to it.”

A very low baritone mumble sounded from the direction of the sofa, “I suppose technically it would be Sir William…”

John leaned forward, frowning. “Sorry, what?”

An even lower unintelligible baritone mumble combined with a dismissively fluttering hand.

“Did you say William?”

No sound at all.

“Sherlock?”

“Yes, fine!” Sherlock bellowed and performed a quick manoeuvre that landed him basically standing at attention, horizontally – on his back on the sofa, straight as an arrow and stiff as a board, hands clenched into tight fists at his sides. He took a sharp breath, crunched up his nose and told the ceiling in an extremely disgusted sneer, “Officially my first name is _William_.” Somehow, he managed to make the name sound like a particularly hideous swearword.

John blinked. Secretly, he’d always been a bit envious of Sherlock’s name. John himself had such a common name that he was used to having a qualifier. He was Harry’s Brother John, or John the Midget, or John the Doctor, to distinguish him from all the other Johns in any given environment. Unless he was _the_ John to someone – the way he was to Sherlock. In fact, ‘John!’ in Sherlock’s vocabulary seemed to equal ‘Help!’ and ‘Look!’ and ‘Eureka!’ among other things. John had never known that his name could be so versatile. And, sure, William was a fairly common name as well and the daft genius certainly was extraordinary enough to deserve an unusual and distinct name but was Sherlock not really Sherlock’s name?

“You made Sherlock up?” Wonder how he’d done it – choose two random syllables and stick them together and voila, an appropriately weird and unique name! Would it be sher-lock or sherl-ock?

Sherlock whipped his head around and glared at John. “Oh, don’t be absurd!” With angry, quick motions, he wrapped the dressing gown tight around himself. He assumed what appeared to be his ‘horizontal at ease’ position – he lifted his bony knees and laced his fingers over his stomach. “It’s my middle name. My _middle_ middle name.”

“Your what?”

“For Heaven’s sake… William Sherlock Scott Holmes,” Sherlock positively spat out the litany, with particularly explosive pronunciation of the final ‘k’ and ‘t’ of the two names in the middle. “That’s my name. I simply happen to prefer Sherlock.” He tapped the sofa with his bare toes and wiggled his fingers, scowling at John, obviously expecting John to poke fun at the names.

Well, who was John to let Sherlock down? He sat back and grinned, folding his arms across his chest and applying a musing tone to his voice, “I see. Hmm. Sir William isn’t half bad. Willie. Will. Bill… Liam! Wylie. Billy.” He giggled. “Wills. Wills Holmes, now there’s a tongue twister.”

In one fluid motion, Sherlock sat up and spun his body to face John. “You tell anyone and I will hypnotise you into calling me Sir Sherlock!”

“You wouldn’t!”

“Try me.” The baritone dropped a few kilometres below the Earth’s crust and the pale eyes went glacial.

They glared at each other for a while. John was almost tempted to keep going, almost, because when it came to childish antics he could play at Sherlock’s level. However, when Sherlock decided to crank it up a notch and go full throttle, he was spectacularly single-minded and bloody _scary_.

“Okay. Fine,” John relented. “I won’t tell anyone, not a soul, not a peep. Cross my heart.”

“Fine. Good,” Sherlock snapped and leaned back in the sofa, still keeping his unblinking laser gaze on John.

“Good.” They continued the staring-down match for a moment longer, in identical poses, both seated, leaning back with their arms folded across their chests. Then John’s eyes started to feel gritty and he had to blink. Game, set and match to the daft detective. Or, well, call it a walkover – John had got curious and he knew it was practically impossible for him to speak and not-blink at the same time. Right now there was a burning question on his mind. “You couldn’t really hypnotise me into doing that, could you?”

Quite calmly – one could say friendly – Sherlock replied, “Yes, I could.”

“Sherlock…”

Sherlock paused mid-ruffle – he’d stuck his fingers into his hair and was in the process of creating a wild afro slash poodle hairdo for himself. “What?” he asked, gave a couple of more energetic ruffles and added, “We have already established that you are very suggestible, John.”

That they had, during one of Sherlock’s experiments that John naïvely agreed to participate in. In his defence, John’s point had been that Sherlock couldn’t possibly teach himself how to hypnotise someone, not by reading a bloody book – and he still maintained that any normal human being wouldn’t be able to do that – but Sherlock being Sherlock, he speed-read through the volume, demanded that John act as the guinea-pig, and got it right on the first try. He succeeded in making John sneak into Mrs Hudson’s flat, nick her beauty bag – which incidentally looked like a hatbox and was roughly the size of one, too – and apply makeup on himself. Fortunately, Mrs Hudson had been away that night, but it had been quite awkward enough to have to go to her the following day and offer to compensate for the mysteriously vanished items. And who knew makeup was so expensive?

John narrowed his eyes. “But how can you be so sure that you could do that, after only one try? You _promised_ me you wouldn’t trick me into making a fool of myself.”

“And I haven’t. Upon my word as a gentleman,” Sherlock declared with quiet dignity, looking nothing like a gentleman and far from dignified, “nothing public or embarrassing.”

John raised an eyebrow at Sherlock’s arrangement of dark curls exploding in all directions – would that be a curl-plosion? “Yeah, well, your definition of embarrassing differs from mine so pardon me for being suspicious…” John’s voice trailed off, he felt his eyes go wide, and he groaned, “Oh God, I know that look. What the hell did you make me do?”

Sherlock huffed, clearly trying to arrange his features into something less shifty. “Nothing you wouldn’t already have been predisposed to do so it doesn’t matter.”

“Sherlock.”

Silence – and not the comfortable sort, it was the impending doom sort of silence.

“William Sherlock Scott Holmes!”

Sherlock shifted on the sofa, sniffing and huffing. “I may have planted a suggestion for you to…” He averted his eyes, lowered his voice and blurted out with rapid-fire delivery, “to-seek-my-company-after-a-nightmare.”

All John could do was stare. Honestly. He didn’t hear right, did he?

“Just that – no forcing you to talk about your dream or talk at all, for that matter,” Sherlock said defensively, his eyes still averted and the words still tumbling out of him with incredible speed – how he managed to enunciate clearly at that speed had always mystified John. Sherlock was also still shuffling his feet on the rug, like a hesitant child afraid that he’s made a mistake and will be punished for it.

“You came downstairs a couple of times of your own volition, after a nightmare, to make tea, and I happened to be in the sitting room – you know I don’t sleep much, natural enough that I was there in the middle of the night – and you seemed to benefit from my company. Not that we spoke, as such, but you appeared to instinctively calm down as long as you had visual confirmation of my presence. And then it appeared that you were too uncomfortable or embarrassed to repeat the remedy after you became conscious of what you were doing. I assumed it had to do with some social etiquette rule or another but I couldn’t ask you to explain because you were clearly pretending that you didn’t have nightmares in the first place – an interesting phenomenon in itself, it was either a case of extraordinary self-delusion on your part or another twist of social conventions but again, I couldn’t ask you.”

The long sentence had taken its toll and Sherlock had to pause for half a second to fill his lungs before forging on, “I had to resort to experimenting which posed a conundrum since I was fairly certain that you wouldn’t take kindly to me barging into your bedroom – you never do, and in this instance you would be asleep and suffering from nightmares the very existence of which you were denying – so I had to invent ways of interfering from a distance. Playing the violin seemed to have a calming effect but you never came downstairs and I thought… Well, perhaps giving you a subconscious nudge would help. And it did.” The last sentence came out like an indignant little snap of triumph. “I can’t hypnotise you into doing something that you would consider illegal or immoral or otherwise against your principles, as I have explained. I just… gave you the extra impetus to act on your natural inclination, for your own benefit, and come downstairs, make a cuppa, sit down, sort of stare at me and most often spend the rest of the night on the sofa.”

There was a pause. Sherlock cast a quick, sideways glance at John and asked in a soft voice, “Not good?”

John was still trying to digest what Sherlock had said, sorting out the speed-of-articulation-normally-reserved-for-delivering-a-deduction into palatable bits. “You play just to calm me down?”

Sherlock shrugged, his eyes on the floor. “The violin helps me think. I don’t mind you as audience.”

“And you’re always there.”

“I don’t sleep much. You really ought to know that by now, John,” he rolled his eyes at his own bare feet, “you lecture me on it ad nauseam.”

“But you’re _always_ there when I’ve had a nightmare, Sherlock.”

Why hadn’t it ever occurred to John to wonder why Sherlock was always there at night? Was it part of the suggestion Sherlock had planted, John’s tendency not to question why Sherlock was there or why the endlessly curious man never asked him what he was doing up at night or… damn, or why John himself had suddenly decided that it was a perfectly normal thing to do, to go and gape at his flatmate as a middle-of-the-night, calming-frayed-nerves-after-replays-of-war routine. Of course it was part of the suggestion – Sherlock _would_ create a complex message like that, subtle but full of nuances and sub-clauses to deal with any and all eventualities. The man was nothing if not thorough when he put his mind to something.

“Are you awake or do I wake you?”

Sherlock fiddled with the ends of the dressing gown’s belt. “Does it make a difference?”

John sighed and threw his head back to stare at the ceiling. “So I do wake you.”

“Sometimes. It’s fine. I don’t mind.”

“Damn.” He closed his eyes. He’d thought that Sherlock hadn’t noticed the nightmares. Stupid really, the man noticed everything. But the dreams had come less and less often since he’d moved to Baker Street so he’d thought… or perhaps hoped was a more accurate term… “Am I loud? I’m loud, aren’t I?”

“Loudness is a relative concept. I have an exceptionally keen sense of hearing,” Sherlock stated matter-of-factly. “I doubt that the neighbours hear you. Mrs Hudson certainly has never mentioned it but then again, she has some trouble hearing and you do sleep on the second floor while her bedroom’s on the ground floor.”

John sighed and rubbed at his face. Well, Sherlock deduced the hell out of his life anyway, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the detective was aware of his interrupted sleep patterns. And nightmares were to be expected after what he’d been through, the doctor in him accepted it, it was just that the soldier in him hated how… helpless and weak and scared they made him feel. He was used to being in control, facing danger and not backing away from a fight – but how does one fight one’s own subconscious? Well, apparently, by having Sherlock Holmes hypnotise one into accepting help in the fight.

John let his hands fall to his lap and opened his eyes. He couldn’t help smiling. The poor lanky man was still sitting stiffly upright and staring grimly at the floor like he was sure that John would start scolding him any moment now and he was mentally bracing himself for the onslaught. Technically, he was correct in assuming that John would be mad. After the whole Baskerville fiasco, John had made it very clear – with threat of physical harm added if Sherlock failed to follow this particular one of John’s rules – that Sherlock was never, ever, to use John as an experimental subject without John’s well-informed consent.

But like Sherlock had said, John had been pretending that the nightmares didn’t exist, and even if John had admitted to having nightmares – which was doubtful – when asked directly, he would’ve been much too embarrassed to let Sherlock try any remedies. And, also, it was quite touching that Sherlock had spent countless nights playing the violin just to see if the music might help John.

“Thank you.”

“Oh.” Sherlock looked up and blinked at John. “So it’s good?”

John nodded and then grinned at the sight of the relieved smile on Sherlock’s face – almost on par with a euphoric smile of serial-locked-room-murder-mystery-oh-it’s-Christmas! “Yeah. Very good. It really helps, just lying on the sofa and listening to you. And, well, I suppose staring at you, you’re right, I tend to do that. Then, at night, I mean. What you said, visual confirmation… yeah.”

“Hmm. Good.” Sherlock nodded to himself, still smiling.

“And, um, you don’t have to play. I mean, I like listening to you play but if you don’t happen to feel like it, just do whatever you do, okay? It helps, you being there, maybe just working at your microscope, you know. In fact, just knowing that you’re nearby, in your room,” John said, let out a nervous laugh and then cleared his throat, “if you happen to be asleep and, um, not busy thinking.”

“Ah.” The smile disappeared and Sherlock frowned at his knees. “I see.”

Damn. “No, Sherlock, I don’t mean that I don’t want your company. Okay? It’s good, very good, if you’re there, doing… whatever.” Oh, yes, his famous oratorical skills when approaching emotional topics such as gratitude – they were gleefully messing things up again. Just take a deep breath, John. “What I mean is… I’m sorry if I wake you, you need to sleep, you don’t have to get up for my sake.”

“It’s not that often, John. And I don’t mind. Sleep is a waste of time anyway.”

John huffed out a laugh. “But you play me lullabies. That’s a bit illogical, isn’t it?”

“Pre-emptive measures, John, purely selfish.” Sherlock rolled his eyes and proceeded to whip his thighs with the ends of the belt. “You get dreadfully stroppy if you don’t get your ridiculous six or seven hours a night.”

“Right,” John drawled and managed a more convincing laugh this time. “Yes, we stupid ordinary people tend to be that way.”

Sherlock spread his arms and stretched out the silk belt, wearing a detached frown on his face, staring into the distance, just to the left of John. He released the belt and brought his hands slowly together, steepled fingers under his chin. “So many hours wasted on tedious non-activity, each and every night. It’s quite strange, actually.”

“Of course it is.” And of course Sherlock wouldn’t contradict John’s statement that he was stupid and ordinary.

“You are not stupid, John.”

Christ, the man would be the death of him one of these days, what with his creepy mind-reading abilities.

“An idiot, yes, but practically everyone is. You are fairly… moderately clever, though.”

John gave his eyes a roll. Sherlock and compliments was almost as dangerous a combination as Sherlock and firearms. John had never known Sherlock to miss a target but when it came to what he perceived as compliments, his words were so blunt and brutally honest that they hit a person’s self-confidence with the destructive force of a bullet fired at point-blank range. “Oh, that makes me feel so special, thanks.”

“You are welcome,” Sherlock replied with perfect sincerity.

There was a long pause. Sherlock spent it utterly still, with his hands in the prayer position, staring into nothing. John wondered if he was pondering the mysteries of John’s tedious need for sleep or John’s fairly moderate cleverness or something else, completely unrelated to their conversation. One could never really tell with Sherlock, he looked equally lost in equally deep thoughts no matter what he was contemplating. It could be that he was meditating on the properties of frozen urine – there was a plastic container of what appeared to be urine in the freezer, John hadn’t asked what it was for or, indeed, what exactly it contained. He’d learned very quickly not to ask questions that he didn’t want to know the answers to, it was a prerequisite for maintaining one’s sanity when sharing a flat with Sherlock Holmes.

Hmm, this sudden notion that it was a brilliant idea to go and seek out Sherlock to stare at whenever John happened to have a nightmare had occurred about four months ago… John thought back and tried to pinpoint an exact date. Of course, he didn’t have the bloody dreams every night anymore so it was difficult to calculate when Sherlock had planted the suggestion in his head. It could’ve taken several days for John to actually have a nightmare and act on the suggestion. He couldn’t remember anything out of the ordinary from four months ago – or, well, ‘ordinary’ was a spectacularly broad concept at 221B Baker Street – but he wondered how Sherlock had done it. Had he sneaked into John’s bedroom and whispered into his ear while John was asleep? Also, he wondered if the suggestion would still be at work, now that he was aware of it.

Not that John was planning to stop taking advantage of Sherlock’s company. The self-proclaimed high-functioning sociopath had spent a lot of time and effort on coming up with a working solution. And just to help a friend in need. After all, he’d done it in secret and hadn’t intended to tell John about it, he probably would’ve kept on doing it indefinitely, quite content never to receive thanks for it. John wasn’t about to invalidate Sherlock’s hard work by refusing to accept his help. As Sherlock had pointed out, John didn’t have nightmares that often – not anymore – and Sherlock spent most of the nights awake, anyway. And stupid ordinary John really did need his sleep, especially if Sherlock had a case on and was hauling John with him all over London. It used to be so that John couldn’t sleep after a nightmare and he’d be exhausted and cranky the entire following day. Nowadays, he got proper four or five hours in, kipping on the sofa after a dose of stare-at-Sherlock-muttering-at-his-microscope.

Also, John thought to himself, watching Sherlock suddenly vault from the sofa and step over to the music stand, the daft detective had looked so radiantly pleased with himself when John had pronounced that his help was ‘good.’ They weren’t prone to expressions of sentiment, either one of them, but it was very… heart-warming to know that Sherlock – as unfamiliar as he was with the concept of friendship – was showing genuine interest in John. After all, Sherlock the genius rarely bothered to be personally interested in others, even less to plan and execute secret stratagems to help someone with their private problems. He was more likely to deduce a person’s private problems and then loudly declare them to the world and his wife. So perhaps John was helping Sherlock in return by providing him with a target for his practice on be-considerate-of-another-human-being skills.

Funny how things turned out – Sherlock working as a sedative for John, John repaying the favour by doing practice target duty...

Sherlock was crouching down by his violin case and now he leaped up, holding his violin and bow. He placed the violin carefully on the desk and started to rosin the bow, head turned to look out the window. John watched him thoughtfully over the open lid of his laptop. The open dressing gown fluttered about a bit as Sherlock’s arms moved rhythmically, the blue silk creating a soft rustling sound. Not unlike a certain other material he sometimes wore.

“But if you were knighted…”

“Not going to happen, John,” Sherlock cut in without turning from the window.

“Just if, Sherlock. A hypothetical. Humour me, alright?”

Sherlock shrugged and made a vague sound that could be interpreted as ‘go on.’ At least, that was what John chose to interpret it as. “Right. So. Would you be wearing the sheet again?”

Sherlock spread his arms, the bow momentarily pointed at the ceiling, and looked down at himself. “Why? Would you prefer me without it?”

“No. God no,” John groaned, slapping a hand over his eyes. And he’d thought that a sheet-clad Sherlock was awkward company in public, this alternative hadn’t even occurred to him… Well, of course, ‘without it’ could mean ‘dressed in normal clothes instead’ but knowing Sherlock, it probably meant what John had immediately thought it meant. “But you’ve done it twice now, haven’t you?” Oh crap, another thought that hadn’t occurred – what if Sherlock routinely visited the Queen wearing a sheet? John gave his head a firm shake. No, not even considering that idea. “I mean, who goes to Buckingham Palace naked? Honestly? Well, present company excluded, obviously…”

Sherlock flicked the bow, pointing it at John over his shoulder. “You did.” And he returned to applying the rosin.

“What?”

“Underneath your clothes, you were quite naked. As was the Queen,” Sherlock added, let the rosin drop down into the case, picked up the violin and placed it under his chin. “There we sat, all three of us, drinking tea, in the nude.” He drew the bow across the A-string to start the tuning process.

John blinked, unwittingly imagining the scene as it had been a few weeks ago but sans clothing. “Good God, what a disturbing thought.”

He shuddered. Seriously, it felt like high treason to picture the Queen naked. Worse than picturing his parents having sex. For some strange reason, it was worse than picturing _himself_ bloody starkers in the presence of a fully dressed monarch. Oh, he’d be absolutely mortified to be naked in a situation like that but it felt much, much worse to imagine the situation reversed. John frowned and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to stop his mind from veering towards picturing the different variations of the situation and the relative levels of embarrassment involved. If he didn’t stop now, he’d soon be creating a Sherlock-style table on his laptop, variation A: naked-John/sheet-wrapped-Sherlock/fully-dressed-Queen, mortification on a scale of one to ten…

“But it’s true. Underneath our clothes, we are all equally naked, John. Regardless of sex, age, rank or religion, we are all naked, all the time.”

There was a lengthy pause as Sherlock was intent on tuning his violin and John tried his hardest to get his mental Queen properly covered while at the same time considering Sherlock’s statement. It was remarkably simple yet somehow very revealing – no pun intended – the observation was astute, blunt and rather rude, like the man himself.

John wondered if it was how Sherlock viewed the world, or the people in it, bared and revealed to his keen senses and observant eye… and then wondered if Sherlock’s deductive genius allowed him to see everyone he met as if they actually were naked. Sherlock saw all the physical details about a person, it probably wouldn’t be much of a leap to picture that person stripped. And he was never moved in one way or another by physical attributes, John doubted if Sherlock even understood the normal instinctive need to categorise people on a scale of attractive-unattractive or beautiful-ugly. People were people, as far as Sherlock was concerned – idiots, most of them, yes, but irrelevant matters such as attractiveness didn’t enter the equation for him.

“That’s… that’s almost philosophical of you, Sherlock.”

“Now you are just insulting me.” Sherlock craned his neck, lazily tapping the fingers of his left hand on the strings, addressing the ceiling in a languid sort of whine, “Why isn’t there any tea? I am thirsty.” He gave the music stand a poke with the tip of the bow, nudging a piece of sheet music that was in danger of slipping off it.

“The kitchen’s that-a-way, _Sir_ _Sherlock_. Contrary to popular belief, I’m not your servant. Tap, kettle, teabag, mug. Deduce.”

“You forgot milk and sugar. Anyway, you will make some eventually, you always do. I will just wait.” He created a quick little cascade of notes. “I think I ate the last of the biscuits but Mrs Hudson will surely have some. You can ask for tips on how to apply lipstick while you are at it.” He twirled around to direct a sharp, assessing look at John before turning his back on him to stare out the window again. “You really were abysmally bad at it, John.”

John turned back to his laptop, muttering, “I’m the one who should be knighted, for controlling my urges to strangle you…” The screen had gone to power-save mode so he tapped a key and was greeted by the depressing sight of poorly worded, half-formed lines of text.

“Hmm. Take it up with Mycroft.” There was a discordant screech from the violin as he said the name. John winced and gritted his teeth.

“The knighthood bit or the strangling bit?”

“Either. Both. I am sure Mycroft” – identical screech again, so it was definitely deliberate – “would be delighted either way. All hail Sir John, protector of the Realm, slayer of Sherlock.”

And he started to play a melancholy slow melody while John resumed his battle with the decoding of Sherlock’s deductions. He found himself humming along to the music and realised that he’d often heard this particular piece at night, drifting up from the sitting room while he was sitting up in his bed, sweaty and gasping and shivering with semi-suppressed memories of blood and death. It must’ve been Sherlock’s standard remedy before he resorted to hypnotism. John gave his head a shake, smiling to himself. Sir William… protector of friends, slayer of night terrors.

John idly wondered if Mycroft had three names and if so, would Sherlock share them with him if he asked. He also occasionally glanced at Sherlock and giggled under his breath at the prospect of seeing Sherlock’s face when he’d finish playing and happen to catch a glimpse of his curl-plosion in the mirror above the mantelpiece. Meet the Queen dressed in nothing but a sheet the daft detective would, with reckless abandon, but the hair had been carefully arranged even then.

Ah, the joys of domestic bliss, Baker Street style.


End file.
